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Comment by jltsiren | Hacker News Reader

Big pharma is not like Bell Labs of old. Their researchers are expected to do work their bosses consider productive. They have no need for people who want to do curiosity-driven research and release the results to the public.

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Big pharma is not like Bell Labs of old.

Then maybe this is a sign that things should change back towards that direction.

Even Bell Labs would not be doing the type of research that is necessary. Look at all the innovation in science that happened back then! Bell Labs was an outlier but it was not the primary driver of science by any means.

You're right, there were many other companies doing it too. General Electric, General Motors, Sylvania, etc.

That's not what I was saying. The foundational research that built the massive economic engine of the current US did not come from industrial research.

The "massive economic engine of the current US" is certainly the result of large companies' research. They have all been very open about that, so do you have any proof to the contrary?

More examples: IBM, Kodak, Xerox...

Did you overlook the transistor?

Built at Bell Labs in 1947, getting a Nobel prize for Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain a few years later?

It's hard to think of a part of any economic engine that doesn't rely on transistors for the last many decades.

Sure - but it's a moot point unless you're proposing plausible ways of achieving that, and that could be adopted by a movement with credible political power.

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